Winni Playhouse's 'Chicago' set created by Emmy-winning SNL designer

MEREDITH — What goes into a set design? If it’s done right, it should indicate a time and place for the audience, it should help the actors to tell the story, and to serve as a playground for the choreographer. It’s a difficult needle to thread, and when it’s done right, in most cases, the audience won’t pay it any mind.

That’s just fine by Melissa Shakun, who designed and helped build the set for Winnipesaukee Playhouse’s production of “Chicago,” running through Aug. 10.

Earlier this year, the Playhouse boasted a show with an Oscar winner – Ernest P. Thompson, who acted in the production of “On Golden Pond.” Thompson had earned an Academy Award for the screenplay he wrote for the 1981 film. Now, with Shakun, theater-goers have a chance to see an Emmy winner’s handiwork first-hand. Shakun, who has made a career for herself in television, won an Emmy last year for her work on the set for the televised musical, “Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert.”

Shakun has worked as art director on shows such as Homeland, The Jim Gaffigan Show and The Americans. She is currently working on Saturday Night Live. But 10 years ago – before any of those jobs were offered to her and she was barely out of graduate school – she got her first job as a set designer at the Winnipesaukee Playhouse, which then was still in the Alpen Rose plaza in The Weirs.

And, said Artistic Director Neil Pankhurst, Shakun has made time each year to return to the Winnipesaukee Playhouse, even as her television career has ascended.

“Honestly, coming up to the theater is the highlight of my summer, if not my year,” Shakun said. “My design work in general has been in television, here I get to go back to what I love to do,” which is musical theater, she said.

Working in television means navigating a union-regulated workplace, which means that the person who designs the set can’t help build the set. Those rules go out the window in Meredith, where, hours before the curtain lifted for the first performance of Chicago, Shakun still had paint under her fingernails. “I love to do all the craft projects,” she said.

So how does one go about designing a set for a musical? For Shakun, it begins with the music. She listens to the score, then reads the script, and researches the time and place that the story is set within, “so that I have a good understanding of history and politics, what is happening,” she said. For “Chicago,” she also sought out photographs of 1920s-era Chicago jails, to get a sense for their architecture. Then she met with the director, Clayton Phillips, and choreographer, Bryan Knowlton, to learn what they were hoping for in a set. Finally, she started to design.

Sitting in front of her finished set, Shakun said she doesn’t mind if her efforts go unnoticed by audience members.

“The set informs you of time and space – if the set is bad, you’ll notice it,” she said. “This set is very large, it feels industrial and strong. If the set overpowers the actors, that’s a problem.”

It’s become a rare treat for Shakun to be able to spend so much time and effort on one set. She just finished her first season as one of the art directors for Saturday Night Live, which she said was unlike any other design job she’s had.

“It was crazy – SNL is really nuts,” she said. The SNL work week starts, for her, on Wednesday evening, when there’s a read-through of 40 sketch scripts. By 10 p.m. of that night, they’ve decided which of the sketches will be produced for the show and which art director will handle each sketch. By midnight, they’ve already drafted a design for their sets. It’s back to work by 8 a.m. the next morning to meet with the crew that will build the sets, and rehearsals start at 2 p.m on Thursday. Friday is another 8 a.m. to midnight shift, and the same for Saturday, with final touches on the sets taking place just a few hours before the audience arrives. Each work week demands about 60 hours over a four day span, for about seven-and-a-half months.

Over the course of her first season, Shakun said there were a few of her designs that she’s particularly proud of. She created a set for the Trump brothers’ bedroom for a cold open scene, a “kooky sketch” called “Meet Me in the Ladies’ Room,” and a particularly ambitious design for a sketch titled “Bodega Bathroom.”

The schedule might be exhausting, but she feels like a stronger designer for it.

“You get to design such a variety of things, it pushes you aesthetically, learning about different periods in history, different parts of the world,” she said.

If she was exhausted, though, Pankhurst said there was no sign of it when she arrived to work on “Chicago.”

“The weird thing is that she considers it a holiday,” to come to Meredith, Pankhurst said. “I don’t understand that, you’re working your butt off when you come here,” he said to her.

Shakun replied, “I still feel like I come up here and it’s a vacation. I get to be so much more hands-on and creative. And I love coming up here. It’s a family affair. It’s like coming home… My soul needs to come up here to feel fulfilled and happy.”